GREEN BAY-A season after the Green Bay Packers stunned most of NFL Nation by becoming the second No. 6 seed to win the Super Bowl, quarterback Aaron Rodgers had a hunch that playing for a repeat title would happen.
"I thought we were going to run through that thing and be in the Super Bowl," Rodgers recounted Wednesday, referring to what had the makings of the greatest season in Green Bay's illustrious history in 2011.
On the heels of going 15-1 in the regular season, the Packers never came close to defending their league crown. As the top seed in the NFC, they lost in humiliating fashion, 37-20, to the New York Giants in the divisional round of the playoffs at Lambeau Field.
The upstart Giants, who finished 9-7 that season, went on to do the unthinkable, winning Super Bowl XLVI against the New England Patriots.
New York's return to the postseason after a four-year absence incidentally comes with a return trip to Green Bay.
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The fourth-seeded Packers (10-6), who rallied to win the NFC North title on the last day of the regular season, host the fifth-seeded Giants (11-5) on Sunday afternoon in the finale of the league's four wild-card games.
As prophetic as Rodgers was in saying Green Bay would "run the table" after it stumbled to a 4-6 record, perhaps the tough lesson of how the 2011 season played out kept him from making another bold prediction. No matter that the Packers are the league's hottest team going into the playoffs with that six-game winning streak.
"Look, I just talked about running the table and getting into the playoffs," Rodgers said. "Obviously, it's win or go home at this point. That's the focus - keep on winning and get this thing to Houston" for Super Bowl LI.
Plus, there's no use talking next game, let alone running the table all of the way to Texas in four weeks, if the Packers can't purge their postseason monster, that being in the guise of the Giants.
Four years before the lopsided outcome that abruptly ended Green Bay's magical 2011 season, quarterback Eli Manning and the Giants coolly kicked aside the favored Packers 23-20 in overtime in the NFC Championship.
Rodgers, in his final season as a backup to Brett Favre in 2007, and kicker Mason Crosby are the only two current Packers players who experienced both gut-wrenching January losses to the Giants at Lambeau.
Manning and long snapper Zak DeOssie are the only two active Giants who have been with the team since 2007.
As for Packers head coach Mike McCarthy and first-year Giants counterpart Ben McAdoo, they have a shared sentiment of heartache from those two infamous playoff games in Green Bay lore. McAdoo was McCarthy's tight ends coach through the 2011 season before moving over to quarterbacks coach for two seasons, then leaving to become the Giants' offensive coordinator in 2014.
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"Playoff losses are tough, but they don't really factor in this game (Sunday)," McCarthy said. "I know 2007 and 2011, Ben McAdoo and I are both still very disappointed with those losses. (But) you get over it. I think it's worked out pretty good for Ben."
McAdoo just hopes his second Lambeau Field homecoming this season goes better than his first.
Players and coaches from both sides insist neither team is the same from when the Packers dominated the Giants 23-16 in a Sunday night game Oct. 9. Green Bay racked up 406 total yards while controlling the football for more than 36 1/2 minutes and holding the Giants to a season-low 219 yards.
"I just think they're a much better team today than in October," McCarthy said of the Giants. "I think you see progress, you see continuity that definitely shows up in the production."
And, as McAdoo reacquainted himself with the Packers in the film room this week, he couldn't help but notice what could be the No. 1 reason why Green Bay gets its playoff revenge on the Giants this weekend.
"I don't know about what's different," McAdoo told Wisconsin reporters Wednesday, when asked to contrast the play of Rodgers now to when he completed just 23 of 45 passes for 259 yards and two touchdowns with two interceptions in the teams' Week 5 meeting.
In Green Bay's last seven games, Rodgers has completed 70 percent of his passes for 2,018 yards and 18 touchdowns with zero interceptions. His career-best interception-less streak has reached 245 passes.
"I just see a guy that's playing with an edge, he's playing very confident," McAdoo said. "His fundamentals look good. He's confident in the players around him that they're going to make plays for him, and he's playing with a killer instinct."
